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About
the Origin 3400
The
NIH SGI Origin 3400 supercomputer, known as nimbus, has an open system platform
which runs the IRIX operating system based on UNIX System 5 Release 4. Software
and applications are tailored to meet the needs of the NIH scientific community.
Nimbus is intended for high-cpu, high-memory jobs which are not necessarily
parallel, such as Matlab. Some high-resource applications such as GCG's
fasta are automatically run on nimbus; this should be transparent to users.
If
you have questions about which platform will best suit your application
or resource requirements, please contact the Helix Staff. Comments or problem
reports should also be sent to staff@helix.nih.gov.
Account
Information and Logging In
Access
to nimbus requires an existing Helix
account. Users can log in to nimbus directly via ssh to nimbus.nih.gov,
and don't need to go through helix.
Initial
password
Your
user name and initial password are the same as your current Helix user
name and password.
Changing
your password
Passwords are synchronized
between Helix and Nimbus. If you change your password on Helix, it will
be changed on Nimbus (within 10 minutes). Password changes are allowed
only on Helix.
Login
Shells
Your
Nimbus login shell will be the same as your Helix shell.
Jobs may be run remotely via lsrun, or submitted via LSF Batch lsbatch.
Please refer to rlogin(1),
lsf(1),
and lsbatch(1)
manual pages for further information.
Usage and Policies
Nimbus is the
computational workhorses of the Helix
Systems. All memory or cpu-intensive
jobs should be run on these 2
machines. In addition, any
jobs that are expected to take more than 1 hr should be
submitted as batch jobs, using the LSF Batch System.
Nimbus is used for both interactive
and batch jobs. Short interactive jobs (< 1 hr) can be
run on Nimbus, but longer jobs must be
run as batch jobs.
A brief tutorial and more
documentation about the batch system
is
available here
Hardware
Configuration
Nimbus
is a 32-processor SGI Origin 3400 system. The processors are based on the
MIPS R12000 800 MHz chip. Each processor has a 32K primary and a 8 MB secondary
cache.
The
SGI Origin 3400 is a bus-based system with a bandwidth of 44.8 GB/s. It
has 32 GB of 2-way interleaved memory and is configured with 20 GB of swap
space.
Disk
Storage
When
a user logs in to nimbus, she/he will see the same home directory as when
logging in to helix. There are several disk storage
options available to users; which one is utilized depends on whether the
space requirement is temporary or permanent, requires high-performance capabilities,
or will need to be accessed from other systems. For more information about
the storage options, see Disk
Storage on the Helix Systems.
Programming
Nimbus
has extensive programming facilities, with
scripting and compiler languages, editors and debuggers.
Manuals
Documentation
for the system and scientific applications is available online or in hardcopy
(printed). For more information, see the Documentation
section.
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